Ill Will

by Dan Chaon

  —

  Dennis and Aaron and Rabbit were downstairs in the living room, playing some kind of video game. Even from the kitchen, I could tell from the sounds of women’s screams that it was inappropriately violent and misogynist.

  But I didn’t say anything.  I took out a container of ice cream and scooped two balls of it into a bowl. I rinsed the scooper off under warm tap water and then put it in the dishwasher.

  Stupid! I thought. I’m so stupid!

  “Oh my God!” Rabbit cried from the next room. “Dude! Why would you do that?”

  I took the ice cream up but she was already asleep, and so I stood there eating it myself, standing in the doorway of the bedroom while a police-procedural drama sent its voices through the room, the television lighting the bed with an aquarium glow. I watched as Jill slept, her face gaunt and frowning like a statue of a stern queen in the pale light.

  A part of me knew exactly what Jill would have told me if she’d given me advice about Aqil Ozorowski. Of course I shouldn’t continue to work with him, she would say. Obviously.

  But a part of me was less sure than she would’ve been. A part of me was moved by Aqil’s email; a part of me had spent a long time researching twentieth-century cults, and the idea of investigating a possible

                   was not unexciting.

  Standing there in the doorway, gaping at the television, spooning ice cream into my mouth, I felt more than ever that I was not one person. I was the awkwardly shuffling, distracted dad that the boys may have vaguely noticed as he opened the freezer and rummaged; I was the kind of fussy, self-involved husband who pestered his dying wife with petty issues about his work life, until she had to beg him: Please. I can’t; I was the kind of man who would sit by your bedside and feed you ice chips from a spoon; I was also the one who thought that the ending didn’t have to be so grim, if only you tried harder. If only you’d be less pessimistic.

  —

  No doubt this must happen to everyone at a certain age: You look up for a moment and you’re not sure which life is real. You’ve split yourself into so many honeycombed parts that they barely notice each other—all of them pacing, concurrently, parallel streams of thought, and each one thinks of its self as me.

  Is it foolish to think that we selves are all connected?  That we are all following the same thread—the tributaries that lead to the people we’ll be in the future, and the trails we followed once in the past? I think of the boy who testified at Rusty’s trial, or the young PhD student writing his feverish, barely acceptable dissertation on the now long-discredited idea of “Satanic Ritual Abuse”; I think of the night, years after the murders, it must have been my sophomore year in high school, living with Kate at Grandma Brody’s house in Gillette, Wyoming, the night Kate came into my room and got into bed with me. I was fifteen and she was…? Nineteen, I think. She was crying.

  “What? What’s wrong?” I said. And even then, there was not just one person asking that question.

  “I’m scared,” Kate said. She pressed her wet face against my collarbone, and I awkwardly put my arm around her, and I guess for a moment I was briefly connected to the person whose wife would say, years later, Please. I can’t.  “What if we made a mistake?”

  “What do you mean?” my fifteen-year-old self asked. As if I didn’t know. That was the last time we ever talked about it.

  JULY 2012

  JULY 2012

  I watched her grow thinner.

  It was hard for her to quit working, but there was the day that she had stumbled before she went into the courtroom, that she’d fallen to her knees and people gasped and came to her aid and even though she rose to her feet and went into the trial and won there were supervisors in the prosecutor’s office who felt that she really needed to take time off.

  She was ill, after all.

  She needed some time away, they said, and she said “Are you firing me?” and her supervisor said of course not, to be honest Jill a cancer victim is the most successful prosecutor we could have because they are so sympathetic, but you’re at the point where you’re falling down in the

  And you’re skeletal and kind of scary and obviously once you’re a little healthier of course you will be welcomed back this has nothing to do with your performance

  “He didn’t actually say that I was skeletal and scary but that’s what he meant,” she said. “He was terrified of me.”

  I watched Aqil take another folder out of his backpack.

  I have a theory, Aqil said. Of course, I need to be aware that this could be a series of coincidences.

  Accidental drowning of young white men with very similar body types, very similar social profiles, and it’s just a problem of binge drinking on college campuses.

  Or maybe this could be the work of a serial killer. Someone who’s stalking these kids, and there’s all kinds of shit on the Internet about “Jack Daniels,” who goes after these guys when they are drunk and overpowers them somehow and then takes them to the river and drowns them. Which doesn’t seem very plausible to me.

  But what if it’s a group effort?

  What if it’s a team, a trained team?

  JULY 2012

  JULY 2012

  Watch, I told myself. Pay attention. Be more aware of your environment.

  I stood at the window of my office on the third floor of the house, thinking maybe Kate was right, that he’d show up on my doorstep.

  What would he look like? I wondered. I tried to picture his face, and I couldn’t conjure up anything.

  He would be forty-eight years old. Long hair, short hair? Fat, thin? Shaved, beard?

  I thought I had a clear picture from when he was a teenager, but even the images from the trial are blurry. I remember that he had a powder-blue suit, like a prom tux, I thought; and that his long hair was pulled back in a very severe ponytail, and his face had been shaved so hard that the skin on his cheeks was shiny and sore-looking.

  But I couldn’t put together an actual image of his face.

  You feel like you’re being watched. That physical sensation—scopaesthesia, it’s called—the prickle on the back of your neck when you sense that someone you can’t see is looking at you.

  It is often described as an unpleasant feeling, an insect-y scuttling, centipede legs.

  Turn around, you think. Then: Don’t turn around. Which is worse?

  In high school there was an urban legend about a killer hidden in the backseat, a killer beginning to rise up behind the driver, just out of his eyesight, an unseen hand reaching around to grab the driver’s neck. That image always stuck with you and sometimes in the car there would be the tingle of scopaesthesia and you would have to quickly, almost a startle reflex, glance behind you because you felt the shape of something rising up. Once you even gasped and swerved the wheel for a moment.

  “He was terrified of me,” Jill said, and I nodded for a moment, thoughtfully.

  “Well,” I said. “Maybe it’s not a bad idea. For you to take some time off work. Maybe he’s not completely un-right.”

  “I am scary and skeletal,” she said. “Do you think I don’t get that? I feel it whenever I walk into a room!”

  “No,” I said. “Not at all.”

  “Oh my God,” Jill said. “Don’t tell me ‘no.’ If you could only see your face! You’re so scared to look at me your eyes are rolled up in their sockets. Look, I know how awful I look. I should just run with it. I should just go to work tomorrow wearing a black robe and carrying a scythe.”

  Which—I couldn’t help it—the image made me laugh. And she burst out laughing, too.

  Aqil waited for me to nod, and when I did he nodded, too. Right? he said. Right?

  This group would decide on a night they were going to take the target out.

  They would follow him.

  They would set up positions in various parts of the bar where the intended victim is drinking. And I think the victim would probably be
drugged at some point. They would find a way to get him away from his friends, maybe he goes to the bathroom, or they lure him outside somehow, and probably he would then be forcibly placed in a vehicle—a van, I’m guessing—and taken to a location where some kind of ritual is performed.

  At the end of the ritual, he’s drowned.

  His body is recovered days—or weeks—or months—after he disappears. There isn’t much physical evidence that can be garnered from a body in this condition, and the police are inclined to see it as the sorry end to yet another drunken frat boy.

  I would not recognize him, I thought. If he was behind me in line at the Quik-E-Mart, where I was buying an e-cigarette, just to try it; if he was in the car next to me on the interstate, merging together onto I-90, on my way to see Mrs. O’Sullivan in Bay Village; if he was walking his dog by my house, would some shape, some familiar movement, wake up in me?

  I did an Internet search. There was, of course, the famous photo—and a few grainy mug shots and courtroom-steps pictures—but nothing of what he looks like now.

  In the courtyard of the Cleveland Heights office, I surreptitiously smoked my e-cigarette. A man with large white hair, very big-headed, was loitering outside the front door. Another came in on a motorcycle and parked at the far end of the organic grocery and then walked very slowly along the asphalt. Was he staring at me?

  I put my e-cigarette in my pocket and turned, headed back to the office. Where I sat in the waiting room, my eyes closed, listening to the waterfall sculpture that played soothing electronic music

  There are the shadows of birds or airplanes that pass over in a blink. There is the fermata hum coming from somewhere, maybe fifty yards in the distance, there is the vague smell of batteries and lightning, there is the sound of a screaming baby one night and you go out on the back porch and you see the neighbor’s cat has a baby rabbit in its mouth, and the scream is repulsively human. “Hey!” you yell at the cat, and it drops the rabbit and they both run off in different directions and you are left alone with the sudden feeling of being regarded with disapproval. As if you’d interrupted an important religious ritual.

  You can feel across your back, across your face: There is a presence that doesn’t like you.

  That was one of the things I loved about our marriage. About Jill. How we could make each other laugh in the middle of an argument, in the midst of a serious talk.

  And then, when we were done laughing, the mood was different.

  “You’re right,” I said. “You don’t look good. I don’t think you should go to work anymore. I think you need to stay home and reserve your energy and”

  “Don’t use the word fight,” she said. “Or stay positive, or whatever you were going to say. Promise me that you’re not going to Life Coach me.”

  I put my hand on her wrist.

  I held her in my gaze.

  My guess is that they are held at some location and tortured for a period of days. Not tortured in a way that would leave obvious physical evidence, but in some kind of ritualistic way, maybe psychological mostly—and then later after the victim is dead they take the body to a local waterway and dump it.

  Does that seem plausible to you, Doctor?   That there is an actual cult of some sort—Satanic or otherwise—and that they have carried out these attacks after a very methodical process?

  If you look at the evidence, this just seems like the only logical way to understand what’s been going on.

  Basically, I think these kids are human sacrifices.

  What would I do if Rusty walked into the room right now? What would I say to him? What would he even want from me?

  And then I opened my eyes and Aqil was standing in the doorway.

  “Doc?” he said.  Very concerned.

  You walk into the Cleveland Heights office building at eight in the morning, up the brass and marble 1920s staircase and the narrow halls with the row of closed doors and only the door to your office is open and the waterfall sculpture is playing its music and you pause on the threshold.

  “Hello?” you say. “Is someone there?”

  And you can feel the frank hostility of the room that doesn’t want to be entered.

  You know, of course, that this is just an illusion. The mind is tricked by all kinds of stimuli and stress makes it worse.

  But the room hates you. You can feel it.

  AUGUST 2012

  THERE WAS THE first message on the answering machine.

  Hey, man. It’s Rusty. And I just want to try to reach out. I mean—I know there’s a lot for us all to wrap our heads around. But let me talk to you one time. That’s all. I…

  I erased it before I listened to the whole thing.

  —

  This was the last thing that I needed. Jill was just starting another session of chemo, and I still hadn’t told her that Rusty had been released from prison, the Innocence Project and all that. It would have upset her unnecessarily. It would be cruel to tell her, I thought.

  I unplugged the landline phone from its jack. If anyone really wanted to get in touch with us, they would call us on the cell. I said to Jill, “I’m sick of all the telemarketing calls,” and she looked at me blearily. Already, the mundane problems of the living were beginning to puzzle her.

  “Fine, fine,” she said.

  —

  “It’s not that I disbelieve you,” I said to Aqil Ozorowski.  “I just feel like we’re at a standstill. We’ve got a lot of speculation but very little evidence. And—from my perspective as a listener—there tends to be a lot of repetition and circling.”

  “I know,” he said. “If I had anything solid I’d be talking to an FBI task force, ha-ha.”

  “In lieu of that,” I said. “Let’s say we’re investigating.  What would be the next step?”

  “That’s the thing,” Aqil said. “Apart from rereading and looking for connections? I thought maybe you’d see some connections that I didn’t.”

  “Well,” I said. We were sitting in my office in Cleveland Heights, and I could hear the soft gurgle of the waterfall sculpture in the waiting room.

  “What about…” Aqil said. “There’s the possibility to talk to some witnesses. There’s this kid I met on the Internet—friend of Peter Allingham—and I think he’d be willing to sit down, but what if you talked to him. I think you’d be better at it than I would.”

  “Hm,” I said. I tried to parse it. We were already in questionable territory. I didn’t feel as if we’d successfully reframed the “investigation,” from a therapeutic standpoint, though he had become more cautious in his use of speculation. I thought we were making headway in looking at the “case” in a more logical and clear-eyed way. Still, it seemed that “interviewing” a “witness” might be ethically problematic. There were issues already with the way I was proceeding, he shouldn’t even be your patient, I thought, client, I thought.

  “Okay,” I heard myself say. “I’m glad to talk to the witness. If you think it’s a good idea.”

  —

  This would make a good TV show, I thought. The therapist and his troubled patient, a former cop who is obsessive, post-traumatic, possibly delusional, but the therapist helps him to get steady enough to solve the crime. Or—to discover that in fact there is no crime, after all. In the end it’s just as heroic to be a

  “There might need to be some paperwork for him to sign,” I said.

  —

  And there was the awareness that he was a cop, and we were connected, and I could call on him if I needed to. There was a feeling of being safe. Things were bearing down on me, and the answering-machine message from Rusty moved through the back of my mind.

  “Listen,” I said, “if I needed to buy a gun, what would you suggest?” Aqil tilted his head and lifted one eyebrow.

  “For protection,” I said.

  AUGUST 2012

  THE YOUNG MAN’S name was Ben Tramer. He was twenty-one years old, a junior at Kent State, so it was easy enough for him to
come to my office in Kent.

  He had been a friend of Peter Allingham, had been at the bar the night that Allingham disappeared, and now he sat uncomfortably in the armchair across from me, hands folded in his lap.

  “So,” I said. “Thank you for coming in, Ben. This is just a very informal”

  “It’s kind of weird that you guys are just getting around to this now,” he said, and stared uncertainly at Aqil, who was standing at the window with his back to us. “It’s been almost a year.”

  “But you’ve previously given a statement to the police, I assume.”

  Tramer raised an eyebrow the way one might when faced by an incompetent bureaucrat. “I never gave any statement,” he said. “This is the first time anybody asked.”

  “Ah,” I said. And his gaze drifted again. His eyes fell on a framed motivational poster: a picture of an arctic lake that was captioned EXCELLENCE.

  We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.

  –ARISTOTLE

  This made Ben Tramer frown.

  “In any case,” I said. “I wanted to get just a very informal picture of your recollections of that night. If you think back on that night, what’s the first image that comes to you?”

  “I don’t know,” Tramer said. “It’s a long time ago, and I was pretty drunk. I mean, so was everybody. Pete was drunk. All our friends were drunk. Everybody in the bar was drunk. You know what’s weird? When Pete first went missing, his mom went on Facebook and put up posters and everything—trying to find somebody who saw him leave the bar, trying to get a sense of when he left the bar, which way he might’ve gone, who was the last person to see him—and nobody came forward. Nobody remembered seeing him leave the bar. It’s crazy.”